Education
by Leia1912
Summary: A small Eric/Sookie one-shot--comedy/romance. Sookie is considering whether her life would be different if she'd gone to college--and yes, you can guess where this is going.


_This was written for FDM's Birthday Spectacular, a collection of stories written as a gift. (See it at: www dot fanfiction dot net /s/5596037/1/Happy_Birthday_FDM (Under Twilight and SVM cross-overs). I thought I'd file it here as well, for those of you on my author alerts._

_And yes, I do promise a new chapter of "Tasting Sin" is coming! (Or Sookie will backhand me. You can only keep a girl from a Viking for so long!) _

Written for the prompts: desk, muscle, poetry

I often think about going to school. It's one of my big regrets, that because of my "gift" (curse, more like it), I could never concentrate enough to make it into college. I even considered a few night classes, but I just knew how hellacious that would be. You're not going to do your best in learning Spanish verbs if you're constantly fending off your neighbor's worries about whether the teacher will catch him cheating.

Still, I often think about going to school and I even dream about it, wondering if that would have been a better path for me. That's why I was sitting up on this moonless night, Eric in down-time next to me.

"Did you send that dream to me?" I asked. He didn't answer, of course; Snoozing Beauty just remained perfect and still on the bed next to me. "It sounded like you."

Closing my eyes again, I let myself remember…

"Shit, I forgot my pen, can you hook me up?" Amelia was saying next to me. My eyes adjusted to the bright light of the classroom, the chatter of students filing in and taking spots around us. I handed her a pen from my purse and watched the doorway.

It was time for the weekly show. Sure enough, the most gorgeous man I'd ever seen strolled into the classroom. He was tall, blond, and his body was a crime against nature. I knew, because my nature sure had a lot of thoughts of crime when I was looking at him. I'd never been able to get any work done the week he'd worn a too-short t-shirt, exposing the lower line of his back when he sat diagonal from me. I'd nearly blurted out, "Briefs!" when the teacher had asked me for my response to the week's homework.

I wasn't alone in my obsession. The entire room watched him glide into the room. I didn't talk to him, of course. I kept my eyes lowered as he took his usual seat across the classroom. He was too big for his desk, his legs sprawling out almost obscenely. Behind him, in a huff, his female friend threw herself into a desk. "I don't know why you want me to go along with this shit. It's not as if you're not—"

"English—it is a rigid language," he said, in lightly accented speech. The woman with him snorted again as Amber, one of the cheerleaders in the class, instantly turned to him with a smile.

"Rigid isn't the right word. You mean hard, I think."

"Hard." He seemed to roll the word around ion his tongue, staring at the now-sweating Amber. He put a hand on his thigh and stroked it thoughtlessly. "Is it?"

The woman behind him rolled her eyes blatantly and I couldn't help but giggle.

This was Eric Northman, the biggest pain in our teacher's behind. Amelia and I both suspected he was a lot more fluent than he let on; his mistakes were always loaded with the most awful innuendo, and he seemed to delight in asking for corrections when it came to anything possibly sexual. I remember when he had asked on the first day about dress customs—"I come to Sweden and we find the body beautiful. Do you like to be naked?" he asked, causing the teacher to turn red and every woman in the room to start fanning herself. He nearly caused a riot when he turned to the girls nearest him and asked if they objected to him being naked sometime. I snickered at the memory. He was a complete pervert, but there was something funny in how he could say these things with a perfectly innocent expression on his face.

Something funny, that is, until he became _my_ pain in the behind. Today the teacher decided to group us up to work on a crossword of biology vocabulary. And of all the partners, I got, you guessed it, Eric.

"You could sit in my lap as we speak. We do that in Sweden," he told me.

I snorted. "Yeah, right. Maybe the rest of your harem here is ignorant, but I'm not."

He smiled with closed lips; the tip of his tongue darted out to wet them. "What kind of knowledge do you have, my….partner?"

"Not the kind you're thinking about. Now stop it and get to work."

Eric, as I suspected, knew a lot more than he let on. We worked well together—too well, as he seemed to have his eyes locked on me the entire time. And if I squirmed a lot—well, the desk was just uncomfortable, okay? And he kept reminding me of this.

"I enjoy learning these words with you. Perhaps you would like to practice them later?" He smoothed his shirt over his tightly muscled abdomen—not that I noticed, of course.

I gave him a Look. "If you keep talking filthy like that, I'm telling the teacher. I'm a lady, you know."

He smiled. "We could study our poetry lesson, then. 'Let us roll all our strength and all/Our sweetness up into one ball,/And tear our pleasures with rough strife…' "

"How are you two working?" the teacher appeared above us, before I could react. I think she was half-afraid I'd comment on Eric's bad manners—even now, he was nudging my foot with his own.

"Oh, he'll get on fine with that one," I heard Eric's blond note-taker comment. She was working with Amelia, I saw, who giggled far too obviously for my tastes.

"I would like to get on her," Eric observed innocently, again with the angelic expression on his face as the classroom burst into giggles. "I would enjoy that very much."

"Mmmm….yes, well," the helpless teacher said, and fled.

That was too much for me. I did what years with Jason had taught me to do: I kicked him. Granted, Eric was built like a mountain and probably as easily hurt, but it did the job. He gave me a startled look.

"Talk about me that way again and I'll kick more than your shin, buster."

His lecherous look slid into something else—almost like respect. "My apologies, then."

"Apology accepted," I shot back stiffly.

"So will you grab anything when you kick me?" His eyes were too blue and mirthful.

"Eric!"

I woke up to my own voice and the memory of his roaring laughter in my ears. Next to me, my pain in the rump continued to rest, no doubt dreaming up all the ways he could torment me in real life. I smiled at how he was carelessly sprawled on his side, his limbs taking up the whole bed. Sure, I could've gone on to college, but what if I had missed out on this? What if I had missed out on a guy who made me laugh like nobody's business (and well, did other things to me that were nobody's business, too.)

I leaned over to brush my lips against his hair. "Don't tell anybody, but I kind of like your kind of education, Eric Northman."


End file.
